With the development of a new business management system,  the network operation of the Hamburger Stadtentwässerung (HSE), one of the largest wastewater disposal companies in Germany, sets new standards for the exploitation of its business potential.

A task that had to be solved within the entire project was the connection of heterogeneous IT systems within the HSE system environment. Through the coupling of the operating data maintained in SAP R/3® PM and the geographic information of the conduit cadastre in GeoGIS, technical partial solutions have been combined to an entire solution. This allows the HSE network operation an effective arrangement of it business processes for the servicing and maintenance of the conduit network.

The middleware and the know-how connected with it for the coupling of the systems were realised with CeGIT.

The process of order and deployment planning of the network operation resources required the linkage and visualisation of SAP R/3® PM data and spatial information from the GI system. In addition, the object data already acquired in the GI system had to be automatically migrated into the PM maintenance module. Furthermore, comfortable handling of large amounts of data between the two IT systems had to be ensured.

The solution developed by CeGIT is based on the APX middleware component (APplication eXchange). Since January 2003, the use of APX makes the necessary coupling between SAP R/3® PM and GeoGIS possible.
APX is designed following the EAI principle (Enterprise Application Integration) for information exchange between any software applications based on Java standards. Here APX works both system and platform independently.

The advantages for the customers result from the order and deployment planning and the data migration:

• Geo-referenced object processing
• Minimizing of data input for work preparation
• Avoiding of data inconsistency in SAP R/3® PM and GIS
• Automated update of data from GIS to SAP®
• SAP® data migration incl. data checking
• Simple check of the migration with message files
• Qualification of data through logical allocation

The project manager of Hamburger Stadtentwässerung, Mr Christian Günner, is very pleased with the function of APX, "The middleware solution implemented by CeGIT helps us with the integration of systems and data in our business processes".